Here are some photos of King Charles on Wednesday, during the Nigerian president’s state visit to the UK. I have to admit, my first thought was that Charles doesn’t look too spry. He looked very old and tired. Maybe he’s simply under the weather this week. That’s the thing about Charles – we know he’s still being treated for cancer, and any time he looks particularly grey/tired, people immediately go “oh, he’s not long for this world.” I think it’s more than possible that his treatments are keeping him stable and he just has bad weeks. Tom Sykes noted something about Charles’s sickly pallor on his Royalist Substack too – Sykes said Charles’s appearance was “worrying” and that the British media is loath to say out loud that Charles “looked weak, tired, and exhausted with even more than usually swollen hands.”
Sykes noted something else, about the still-planned trip to the US. Charles and Camilla are supposed to travel to Washington next month, about a week and a half after Easter. For months, there’s been back-and-forth between Downing Street and Washington about whether to go ahead with the state visit and whether Donald Trump should be “rewarded” with the visit given Trump’s lunatic behavior in general, and specifically towards the UK and Keir Starmer. Anyway, Sykes said “any delay in formally announcing the trip has much more to do with Charles’ health and whether he is truly capable of undertaking it.” Well, I’m not sure about that. I think the delay in confirming the state visit is more about Trump’s behavior. In any case, the palace is definitely briefing that they plan on moving forward with the visit:
The King will be met with a show of American military might when he arrives for a three-day visit to the US with the special relationship at a low ebb. The trip, which has been six months in the planning and has involved a “recce” to the US by a team of Charles’ closest aides and other officials, will go ahead next month despite tensions between the president and prime minister over the war in Iran.
The King will spend just a day in Washington DC, The Times can reveal, where he will pack in engagements such as an address to Congress and an evening banquet.
He will spend another day in New York and make a third stop at a rural location which is yet to be confirmed. The monarch is expected to make a fourth stop at a country with ties to Britain, possibly Bermuda.
President Trump’s team is understood to have concluded that they cannot match British pomp and ceremony but will instead seek to impress the King and Queen with a display of US military might when they arrive in DC.
After an escalating war of words with the president over Iran, Sir Keir Starmer will not be present. Instead the royals will be accompanied by Yvette Cooper, the foreign secretary, who will represent the government, although insiders said this was down to convention rather than a response to recent criticism from the US president.
Trump has repeatedly described Starmer as “no Winston Churchill” in recent weeks. He has been angered by Starmer’s refusal to allow the US to use UK bases for its initial offensive strikes against Iran and has also attacked the Chagos deal. It is understood that the King’s visit is apolitical and there is little expectation of big policy announcements to accompany the trip.
Yeah, if Starmer wanted to cancel the king’s trip, he would do so and with good reason. Starmer and his people probably think this will either help the US-UK relationship or it will be a net neutral. For Charles, it’s just flummery and BS – the fact that he’ll probably only spend a day and a half in Washington is indicative of how unserious this is, as is the fact that he’s tacking on a stop by some random Commonwealth country.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
